My name is Walter Lechner, and I am a fish-freak …I am an enthusiastic aquarist since primary school days, and I am hooked on water, snorkeling and scuba-diving - this was what made me to study zoology and become a scientist.I am interested in fishes in general and catfishes in particular; my studies on hearing, sound production, communication, systematics, morphology, anatomy, and behaviour aim to contribute to a better understanding of acoustic sceneries and fish communities in fresh- and saltwater habitats. Furthermore, I intend to show the effects of underwater noise pollution on residents from freshwater habitats and thus to emphasize the importance of bioacoustics also for conservation plans.Beside scientific publications, which you can find on ResearchGate, I wrote quite a lot of popular articles for magazines, most of them dealt with species new to aquaristic and by far most of them have been published in German Datz-magazine.I am lucky, because my work includes a lot of field work. I love to go to the field. I do also like my lab work, what means measuring hearing in fishes and making behavioural experiments, aquarium sound recordings, and dissections, and I do the computer work, but I adore field trips to tropical waters.For a former three-years project funded by Austrian Science Fund (FWF) I could go to the Australian Nothern Territory for three times, where Dave Wilson (Aquagreen) brought me to remote habitats of Australian freshwater catfishes (family Plotosidae). We recorded ambient noise, caught fishes and I was able to experience the fantastic Australian wilderness including its dangers by crocs and box jellyfishes. I worked with coral catfishes (Plotosus lineatus) at the Red Sea, supported by the staff of the Ducks Dive Center in El Quesier, Egypt, and I could go to the Amazon for the first two times. This work in the Amazon, at the confluence of Rio Negro and Rio Amazonas, in cooperation with Jansen Zuanon (INPA, Manaus), is continued in my actual project “Bioacoustics of Amazonianfishes”, funded again by the FWF (P 26397). With the help of a lot of students and coworkers from INPA, first of all Tiago Pires, and Claudio Zawadzki (State University of Maringá), we do investigations in acoustic communication, sound production and hearing, as well as in the influence of ambient and anthropogenic noise in the heart of the Amazon system. That’s a dream for a biologist, and a lifetime dream for a fish-freak.In the course of my project I do also study the influence of large dams on the acoustic scenery of rivers. Therefore I work on the Rio Xingu near the new Belo Monte dam, in cooperation with Leandro Sousa from the Campus do Altamira of the Federal University of Pará.And last but not least I cooperate with Tacyana Oliveirafrom the State University of Paraíba in João Pessoa, Pernambucco, in studies in seahorses and estuarine fishes.In Europe Martin Glösmann, Stephan Handschuh, and Stefan Kummer from the VetCore of the University of Veterinary Medicine in Vienna and Tanja Schulz-Mirbach from the Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich are investigating the anatomy of the hearing- and sound-producing structures of some exiting fish species I brought from the Amazon, using µCt- and histology techniques followed by 3d-reconstructions.

The Piracatinga, Calophysus macropterus, a very special and exceptional pimelodid catfish.